To summarize, to become a stellar Oracle performance firefighter, you must know how to listen to Oracle, you must know what Oracle is telling you, you must know Oracle internals, and you need experience. This book will prepare you for all but the experience aspect. But through the examples, exercises, and case studies, I'll try to jump-start your experience quotient.

I hope you can see why Oracle wait-event analysis is far superior to traditional performance ratio analysis. As you read this book, you will learn how to exploit the wait interface, take it beyond just listening to Oracle, and also be made aware of how the wait interface can be shockingly misused, leading to an incorrect diagnosis.

I believe Oracle response-time analysis, or ORTA for short, is the most significant performance analysis method DBAs have at their disposal.12 ORTA allows DBAs to quantify (at least in part) a user's experience, to classify time, to anticipate both the application and operating system situation, and to quantify a solution's benefit. Thus, this approach transforms the traditionally defensive firefighting posture into a forward-thinking predictive posture. That is an impressive list!